More than two weeks after a reporter's initial inquiry, the Pope County Election Commission addressed concerns at a public meeting Wednesday from residents about last year's general election - including allegations from Justice of the Peace Dusty Hampton that some ballots were issued improperly.

Pope County Election Commission chair Portia Short told those present that if a poll worker cannot call the county clerk's office to verify the voter's registration, he or she is to issue a provisional ballot, though she acknowledged mistakes do happen.

"To say that in a precinct that someone forgot to give them a provisional ballot, that certainly could happen," she said. "Also, you have to remember, someone can go to a polling location with a voter card and that poll worker, they're given that little card, and they can vote that. Now, in that case, the poll worker is supposed to add their name to a sheet of paper."

Complicating the issue is the fact that some voting sites do not have so-called "land lines," and several are in locations with spotty or no cell service. Poll workers mentioned Freeman/Martin, Burnett, Center, Gumlog, Jackson In and Out, Liberty and Moreland as polling sites with poor phone service. In the Valley and Galla precincts, cell service often had to be obtained by stepping to the door or outside, workers assigned to those areas said.

Short was less clear in responding to Hampton's allegations that unregistered voters were allowed to cast ballots last year.

"It is not the election commission's responsibility to go through the voter book where they sign their name and check that. That is the responsibility of the county clerk," Short said. "She takes a stylus and runs that across every signature in the books ... That is not the election commission's responsibility."

"... It would be a nice common courtesy if a county clerk then called an election commissioner or the coordinator and said 'Hey, are you aware that Joe Blow voted that shouldn't' ... The county clerk should tell us this," she added.

Poll workers are charged, however, with verifying the registration of a voter attempting to cast a ballot, and state law provides that provisional ballots should be cast if verification is not immediately possible.

In January, Pope County Clerk Laura McGuire provided The Courier with a list of five "unidentifiable" voters from the 2010 general election. Of the five, one voted in Center, two in Martin, one in Freeman and one in Wilson Out East.

An unidentifiable voter is one the clerk and her associates were not able to match to registration records, either because the voter was not registered or did not provide enough information to the poll worker for the clerk's office to identify registration information. McGuire said she and her staff know only that they were unable to identify the voters with the information they had.

Two voters were listed as having voted in the wrong precinct. One voted in Martin but was registered in Liberty; the other voted in Gumlog but was registered in Valley East. One voter in Wilson Out West did not sign the roster.

What's

the bottom line?

Neither issue, however, compromised the veracity of the election, McGuire said.

That relative lack of import is something that has commissioner Edwin Shinn taking umbrage with what he called "accusations" against the election commission.

"The fact is, y'all have brought all this up, and you're accusing us of cheating is what you're doing," he said. "Now, if I say that, I'll stand by it. There was no reason to bring it up if you hadn't thought we were cheating, that's the whole idea. We'll take this to heart ... and we'll look at these things and we'll make some improvements."

Electronic poll book & voting equipment

Talk Wednesday shifted to discussion of what improvements the commission might make to streamline processes and avoid controversy. Pope County resident Rick Harrison asked if consideration had been given to implementing an electronic system to verify voters on Election Day.

"That type of computer system is available on Election Day," Short said. "It's called an electronic poll book. It does cost money, and I would like very much to have it."

Election Systems and Software (ES&S) provides at least two such systems, which its website said are designed for "enhancing the security and efficiency of conducting elections, particularly in the precinct."

Short said she did not know how much the system would cost, but thought it might take as much as $50,000 to implement. She said the quorum court voted to purchase the system a couple of years ago, but the decision was vetoed by the county judge.

Pope County Justice of the Peace David Ivy also attended the meeting, and said he supported the purchase of an electronic poll book.

Harrison also expressed concern about the voting equipment used by the county.

"In my personal opinion ... we do not have really state-of-the-art equipment, and we have some real serious possibilities of problems," he said, adding "my biggest concern is the technicality and the technical equipment that we're forced to work with ..."

Ida Ruth Jones, a Pope County resident who has been involved with helping work the polls for many years, disagreed with Harrison and indicated she did not feel the mistakes made were consequential.

"State-of-the-art is great," she said. "How many state of the art things in Pope County do we need? Here we've sat and been rather ugly, in my opinion - I agree, four mishaps out of how many is great. We try to do our best and we'd like to have state-of-the-art in our roads, in the courthouse, everything. Do any of you want to pay for taxes to pay for all of that? I mean, let's get real, people. We make mistakes. But we volunteer for our county, for our friends. We do all of this. We do the best we can, and I think we need to change some attitudes, frankly."

Copied and 'missing' tapes

The controversy regarding possible errors in the 2010 general election was sparked in December when Hampton wrote a letter to the state Board of Election Commissioners director outlining several issues he had with the county election commission - but did not file a formal complaint, an action that would have sparked an investigation by the state board.

One concern listed in Hampton's original letter was that "several" tapes listing results were missing. He also expressed concern that the county clerk received copies of some tapes rather than originals. McGuire confirmed she did not receive all tapes on election night, but did eventually receive them.

Ivy pointed out the law did not require the clerk to receive those tapes on election night.

"The law is that on election night, the county clerk has one and only one responsibility, and that is to transmit the numbers to the Secretary of State's office," he said.

McGuire confirmed she did receive copies of some tapes rather than originals. A.J. Kelly, deputy director at the Secretary of State's office, indicated in a response to a reporter's request for clarification earlier this week, that it was important all three copies were originals.

"Poll workers must produce three 'originals' on the night of the election, and sign each set," Kelly said. "It is important to have originals. Photocopies post-facto appear to be problematic ... So, it is important to have three originals; photocopies by definition could not make the cut."

At Wednesday's meeting, however, Pope County election coordinator Sherry Polsgrove said the reason copies were given is because paper jams on some of the machines caused the commission to have only one original printout in some cases. She said when the tapes jam, there is no immediate way to get more tapes, and would have to turn the machines off and back on to do so.

"The less I have to mess with the machines once voting has started, the better," she said, citing a concern for shutting off and restarting machines once voting has started.

Inaccurate interim totals

Also at the meeting, Ivy brought up a question about interim totals issued by the commission.

One report, which stated it contained results from 41 of 56 precincts, tabulated numbers that, in some cases, were higher than the total number of votes cast in the certified election. Ivy said Polsgrove previously indicated to him a problem with some issues compiling that report.

Lucas Moody, who handles the technical aspects of the voting equipment, offered an explanation.

"When you put the card into the (Election Reporting Manager) ERM, or M100 or iVo, whatever format you are using, you tell it that you want to update, tell it what you want to update, like 'I'm going to do early voting on the M100,'" he said. "You feed the card in and it asks you if you want to feed another card in or not. You feed them until you don't have any more. While you're feeding those in there, they're not actually added to the total. They're kept in a little temporary file so it can build all that together and send it as one chunk in the end.

"The problem is the system is designed like 'I want do early voting M100, I'm going to give you every card; at the end I want to send it all. I want to do early voting iVo, I'm going to give you every single card. At the end, do it all.'

"Because we're trying to do interim reports in the meantime, we end up doing things like 'I'm going to give you election day M100s, but I'm only going to give you half of them, and later on I'm going to give you the other half. I need you to figure out where the first half was in the file and stick them together and figure it out.'

"What happened is when we ran that second interim report, it picked up the early voting totals on the iVo for the Russellville precincts and used them as the Election Day totals, and there were more early voting iVos than there were Election Day iVos, and so the totals got inflated," Moody added. "It didn't actually use Election Day totals, it used - instead of column four, it repeated column two again.

" ... What I've always done, is at the end of the evening, before we run the final report that we hand out to everybody, you blank the temporary file out totally of the ERM ... reset all the totals to zero, then run through all early voting M100s, then when it's done all early voting iVos, then when it's done all election day M100s, then election day iVos so it is doing one category at a time in its entirety."

See upcoming editions for information on other issues addressed by the commission.